After a good long summer break from blogging, I’m back with a bounce with a brand new site for you to explore!

Click the link to find out more about Crofting Connections, I’m a member of the steering group and was only too happy to help out with setting up the blog and email addresses.

Crofting Connections is a fantastic way to provide a rich learning task for providing opportunities for learning outcomes that cut across the whole curriculum. The site tells you more.

The techy bit..the site is a wordpress.com blog that has multi-user functionality, so that means that all involved in the project can update the site, schools can post news and keep the site current. The site however is self-hosted, which means we have our very own domain site, www.croftingconnections.com which serves as a platform for the wordpress site.

It was relatively easy to set up by using a company called www.uk2.net and with the ‘home’ package I got 50 free email addresses linked to the domain name and IT backup help for a year.

This worked out at about £65 a year. Not cheap really, but when you think how much people pay for IT company to set something like that up, it’s cheap as chips (or should that be carrots)

Please enjoy the project and see how it develops…

Last week I was co-facilitating on a training day for professionals who have already been on our 3 day Sexual Health and Relationships Education (SHARE) course and were looking for an update day. A key resource that my colleague Jane Groves and I highlighted was the excellent new toolkit developed by Learning and Teaching Scotland and LGBT Youth Scotland on Homphobia and Homophobic Bullying. The toolkit for teachers with lesson plans can be found here.

In using materials described above it’s key to find out exactly what reporting mechanisms are in place locally, of course every school and authority will have policies in place, but finding out what else is in place to support and report both locally and nationally is crucial.

I’d like to highlight this brand new site for anyone in Highland who wishes to report hate crimes. The Hate Free Highland campaign is a multi-agency led initiative supported by the Highland Community Planning Partnership. Some text from the site.

A Hate Incident is defined as:

Any incident, which may or may not constitute a criminal offence, which is perceived by the victim, or any other person, as being motivated by prejudice or hate.

A hate incident can occur because of a person’s age, disability, gender, race or ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation or social background.

In other words it is when one person targets another through physical, verbal or any other form of abuse and you believe this abuse has been motivated by one of the following factors:

Age: where an incident is directed to a person because of their age
disability: this is sometimes called disablism and involves incidents directed at people with a wide range of disabilities such as physical or sensory impairments, learning difficulties and mental illness
gender: where an incident is directed towards people from the transgender community, as well as women or men
race or ethnic origin: this is often called racism and includes incidents directed at anyone on the grounds of race, colour, ethnic origin, nationality or national origins
religion or belief: where an incident takes place towards a person because of their faith
sexual orientation: this is sometimes called homophobia and includes an incident directed at a person who is or is thought to be lesbian, gay, transvestite, transsexual, or bisexual.
Social background: where an incident is directed at someone as a result of class, income, occupation, educational level or from a combination of these factors.

It is the understanding of victim or the witness that is important in defining a hate incident. In other words if someone thinks that an incident has been motivated by any of the factors listed above they should be reported on this website.

It’s very clear that absolutely everyone living, learning or working in a school community has a responsibility to tackle homophobia, homophobic or racist bullying whether it takes place in school or online, having the confidence to challenge and advertising reporting routes are key.

Further cyberbullying information and links to resources can be found here on the Highland E-Safety Site. Other sources of information Stonewall and Young Scot One Scotland.